Once upon a time there was a young girl who loved a good bedtime story. In fact, it was sometimes the only way she could sleep.
She would dance around her room dreaming about being a princess one day in her pretty pink Cinderella dress and her cute little plastic heels. Around 7 p.m., she would start rubbing her eyes, and her mother knew exactly what that meant: her little princess was ready for bed.
She would tuck her in, read her a bedtime story, kiss her on the forehead, and hold her until she fell asleep. Sometimes, the keeper of the princess would fall asleep right alongside her.
But one night, the little princess woke up to startling noises.
Someone is trying to break in, she thought.
Then a man with bloodshot red eyes walked into her room and dragged her keeper out of bed and into the hallway of her castle. She jumped out of bed and ran after them. And just like that, her bedtime story shattered.
She wasn’t a princess.
There was no castle.
There was only a little girl standing in a hallway watching her father beat her mother. I remember his eyes. The black circles around them were dark. The whites of his eyes were red. I wanted to help my mother, scream, do something.
But I was frozen.
My mother fought back. She ran down the hallway and told me to pack clothes into a backpack. Then she ran to my brothers’ room and told them to do the same.
I’m not sure what time it was, but I remember it being pitch black outside.
And I remember walking.
Walking.
Walking.
Until we reached my grandmother’s house.
My mother never went back.
What Psychology Tells Us About Trauma
I struggled with how I wanted to begin this post because trauma requires a level of sensitivity that many people, and unfortunately many communities, don’t always extend.
I’ve read self-help books encouraging people to move on from their trauma. I’ve heard preachers tell their congregations to forget about it because it happened twenty years ago. And perhaps the worst thing I’ve witnessed is communities going silent when the people who needed support the most were standing directly in front of them.
According to the American Psychological Association, trauma refers to a deeply distressing experience that overwhelms an individual’s ability to cope, causing lasting negative effects on their emotional, physical, and psychological well-being.
What struck me most about that definition is that trauma is personal.
What traumatized me may not traumatize you.
What changed your life may not change someone else’s.
And because of that, no one has the right to decide what was or was not traumatic for you.
Psychologists have spent decades studying the effects of trauma, particularly adverse childhood experiences, or ACEs. Research consistently demonstrates that childhood trauma is associated with increased rates of anxiety, depression, substance abuse, chronic illness, and difficulties in relationships later in life.
In other words, trauma has a correlation with outcomes.
But correlation is not destiny.
And I think that’s the part we don’t discuss nearly enough.
You Get to Choose What Trauma Does to You
Let me be clear. I am not here to tell you to get over anything. Hell, I’m not even here to give some fake “forgiveness is the key to healing” speech.
But I am here to tell you that you have control, power, and the ability to choose what trauma does to you.
Yes, trauma changes people.
It changed me.
For years after that night, I was terrified of men. Family members would laugh at how attached I was to my mother, but they didn’t understand that I wasn’t clingy. I was scared.
Eventually, I grew older. I went to therapy. I began healing the little girl who believed that the world was unsafe. Not because what happened to me stopped mattering. But because I decided that what happened to me would not become the only thing that ever mattered.
Trauma can explain us.
It can shape us.
It can influence us.
But it does not get to own us.
You do not get to choose what happened to you.
But you do get to choose what happens next.
And perhaps that is the most beautiful and terrifying thing about being human: no matter what you’ve experienced, no matter what you’ve survived, no matter how much of your story was written without your permission, you are still capable of becoming exactly who you were meant to be.
